Human Rapamycin Longevity Clinical Trials Begin

Unless you can prevent people from traveling overseas to receive anti-aging treatments, clinics will spring up from Costa Rica to Indonesia. The US, even if it wanted to protect the IP of the few very hard, will have to weigh it against the risk that a systemic competitor like China will provide treatments for artificially low price just out of spite and to gain some sympathy points.

Look at the Cold War. During the conflict with the Communist Bloc, inequality in the West actually went down. In presence of ideological competitors, Western governments learnt to mitigate the worst excesses of their own systems.

You've probably read it already, but Frans de Waal's _Chimpanzee Politics_ ends with the (thoroughly demonstrated by that point) claim that politics is older than humankind.

You mean the opposite? Isn't the theme of the day how hard it is to get the entire world to not swipe the ecological credit card of future optimism?

From an evolutionary standpoint, they absolutely are. The whole idea of life is to produce a variety of mutations in the hopes that at least some of them will be able to overcome hostilities that their predecessors couldn't win against.

>A lot of the suffering inherent to human life is caused by moral compromises made for the sake of future generations' well-being

Well, future generations' well-being is exactly the goal of life and evolution. Any species that fail at ensuring future generations' well-being get wiped out. Whether they like it or not.

Life is hard.

Preserving the status quo is the valuable piece. To me this is an evolutionary behavior. If you’re old, the status quo has likely been good to you and your offspring. Change risks that. When you’re young, your fear of death is non-existent and you’ve had fewer life scars (whether literal or figurative). If you add protection against death, you’re just increasing the risk-averse population whereas traditionally we’ve used death to weed that out over the long-term. In other words humans are naturally biased towards balancing generating change (youth) and resisting change (aging) since change often has risks or harm and you’re less able to weather it well and adapt in old age (at a minimum your brain’s elasticity helps you significantly while you’re young). Keeping people alive will distort that balance.

The question will be whether society can adapt fast enough relative to how quickly life extends. On its face a medical breakthrough that radically shifts aging for everyone would be pretty bad. A similar breakthrough that shifts it for wealthy people would also be bad on any number of fronts. Our legal and tax systems are designed around existing mortality and as you can see, at least in the US, it can take a long time for any changes in reality to be reflected there nor do those changes typically risk upsetting current power and wealth balances.

I don't think that's a given. Many people flat out don't believe in human-caused global warming, at least in America. A lot of people would also interpret it as an act of God-- perhaps judgement day coming- over the scientific consensus. Of course some people also hate to take responsibility, and we all know at least one person who avoids taking responsibility of their own life to the point of ruin.

I don't think society as a whole thinks as similarly as many assume they would. I also don't think humans are as rational with their decision making as we think. Once people acquire habits and addictions, they themselves have a hard time leaving them. I don't believe humans were designed to live forever,and all too common selfishness and ignorance proves that

For what it’s worth, I used to find the arguments that we should put the brightest minds on space exploration over eliminating suffering as concrete, but nowadays.. can’t say they those arguments seem as watertight.. saying that as someone whose hands have touched some of these projects. Curious if others feel the same way or have points to make in the opposite direction

ok but it is not a 100% case that the mind of a 90 year old is the mind of an Alzheimer's patient. Michael Caine is 88 and I think he is doing relatively well mentally.

Basically I’d take either hypothetical form of treatment. Either is better then neither.

My point regarding having the brain of the 90 year old is not that that would be good, but that it would be better than having the brain and body of a 90 year old. I don't want to be frail and prone to injury if I could be healthy and strong.

Regarding social progress - first, it is the modern social views we would be extending and entrenching, not antiquated ones. We are extending the lifespan of Trump voters, not slavers or Jim Crow enthusiasts. Perhaps you are suggesting that our social views, in a hundred years, will seem as reprehensible as those of a hundred years past seem to us. However, there is no guarantee which way social views will progress. Perhaps, without amortals from our time future societies would have worse social views.

Second, I suspect the reason the elderly tend to be more close minded is related to their circumstances. Their minds aren't as plastic, their bodies not as hale, they can't get out to work and be a part of society, etc. If, instead, their bodies were hearty and their minds agile, they might be as amenable to influence as anyone else. We may find the social views of a healthy two hundred year old advance as steadily as society's.

Regardless, I wouldn't kill people or prefer they die just because they have regressive social views. We should convince them if possible or just live with them if not.

There are certainly problems that may arise from extending lifespan. I believe we can solve them.

In theory - this assumes that the drug has an equal effect across the entire system and that all organs will age at the same rate. It may, for whatever reason, not be the case and things will age at different rates.

How about senses? Hearing loss can be non-repairable. Likewise with vision / macular degeneration that may not be fixed with this. How about taste?

It’s a nice idea to think that everything will just stay the level of a 30 year old over the period of 100+ years is, in my opinion, wishful thinking. It will still age, just in different and unexpected ways.

This is a non sequitur. It's not a life extending drug if you forget how to breath correctly or are in a coma.

Perhaps you need to be a little older to fear age, but when you see people dying of cancer who have children, which these drugs will delay, you might see that 6 months extra for their children might mean whether they remember their parent at all, or an extra chance to play ball or a programming session or to reach puberty and have a more mature conversation with them.

You die when your times comes is a slogan for the youth. People on their death beds at 90 are scared and crying and fear what is to come.

I've been thinking about starting Rapamycin, but I need to sit down and do the research first. It's a pretty serious drug. But you are not going to be keeping your body healthy 30 years - 140 years with green tea and exercise.

But I don't get why people don't want to slow down their ageing at all. I get people like the idea of eternal life as a cripple, it's a 2000+ years old story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus but it's not practical.

But you can't enjoy years 90-150 without first surviving years 30-90.

Humans are statistically bad at doing the simple things that would help us live longer, like eating right, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep. Most of us aren't going to make it to 90, and it's about half-and-half cancer versus heart disease what will kill us along the way.

Sure, I could exercise regularly, etc, and maybe reduce my chance of dying before 90, but as a statistical American there's an 80% chance I'm not gonna, and a 40% chance it will kill me.

Hence, I'd be much more excited if they could fix that with a pill. Fixing the dying of "old age" as my cellular machinery slowly degrads, also good, but I've got to survive long enough for that to be a problem first.

Anyway, good fortune to them.

This was a useful belief for humans to develop when there was nothing we could do about death, but now it actively inhibits progress.

I’m guessing there have been studies of a similar nature, but not in a way that’s public or where you may get to know some of the participants before/after these little exposes.

For my part i stopped reading the comment you replied to after the first sentence. People that don’t have enough self control in the instant to moderate their speech to a basic level of civility aren’t likely to follow it with nuanced perspective.

In my opinion there is zero excuse for whataboutism and I heard a story that said that...

I think part of the problem with today's society is that nobody calls BS anymore and we are more concerned with not being perceived as aggressive vs grounding people into reality. We get to make our own "facts".

That being said, there is a way to call BS without being rude but refuting BS is usually an order of magnitude harder than generating. Also, in my experience, a lot of time people that are spewing BS are not interested in a constructive conversation. They just want to feel smart and/or like hearing themselves talk.

This shows that people are more content with ignoring the horror of death than actually trying to fix it.

It's one thing to not fund an organization you've never heard of, that is making claims you're unsure of. It's another thing to not even try to solve a pressing problem with public funding and/or initiatives.

Clearly, people find death problematic, given the lengths we go to avoid it when it comes within striking distance. We moved the world to deal with the imminent threat of COVID. But when death is not near us, we tend not to think about it at all - we actively avoid thinking about it, even.

I think future historians will find this general shortsighted behavior quite interesting - how can a species that so profoundly fears death collectively ignore the issue of aging so as to not even dedicate a noticeable fraction of money, time, and effort into solving aging?

That would still be a major boost to health of said individual.

Most of such improvements will probably be invisible. If they manage to reduce skin age, too, they will wallow in money.

The individualist myopia with all things life-extension is staggering.

However, even if you take the most beneficial version where the odds of a heath issue killing someone by age X is the equivalent of dying from a health issue by 1/10th your age that doesn’t stop accidents. If your risk of car accident at age 30 is X the slowing aging by 1/10th still rolls that dice 10 times by the equivalent of 31. As such people’s odds of reaching the equivalent of 65 still drop as you slow aging.

On top of this stuff like smoking cares more about the number of years you smoked than your age. A 50 year old with 30 years of smoking isn’t that likely to die before 51. However, someone that started at 200 and tries to smoke for 300 years isn’t going to make it to 500.

> this would make you ageless until one day you drop dead

No, that's not how this works. How would a person die of an old chronological age if their biological age is, as far as their body is concerned, still 25 years? It's not like there's a time bomb that goes boom after a certain number of years regardless of what you do.

Even without aging, humans aren't immortal. There's a probability of dying from something other than medical issues. Eventually that adds up.

I think the people willing to give up travel at greater-than-walking-speed, sports, hiking, etc in order to live longer is small enough that they won't be a burden. I'm not sure I would really call that "living" myself, but it's their choice.

If we can possibly keep the immune and cardiovascular system young indefinitely, thus staving off heart disase and cancers, what is going to break down next? Possibly something within the brain.

If we expect a longer lifespan and higher odds of survival for potential children, our instinct is to delay reproduction and have fewer children in order to increase resources available per child.

This instinct developed over a very long period of time, but our technological advances have created a degree of safety and abundance that our instinct was never “trained” on and thus I suspect it is over-suppressing fertility. A longevity breakthrough will appeal to this instinct even more strongly than living in one of today’s highly developed countries. Consequently, I think our instinct will then suppress fertility even further.